Forced marriages in the shadow of Vesuvius: stories of teenagers from poor and immigrant families forced to marry unknown elders

NAPLES – Salila is a sixteen year old girl from Pakistan who lives and studies in Naples. In the morning she attends school and in the afternoon the Gomitoli cultural center, which she attends Dedalus cooperative founded in 2015 in the Porta Capuana area, a territory with a high rate of immigration, to create an opportunity for education and comparison between migrant and local teenagers. Salila falls in love with a boy who, however, does not like her family, who had already chosen another man for her. To punish her rebellion, Salila is forbidden to attend her center: the girl is locked up at home and is prevented from any activity. She writes to her teacher, who alerts the principal, and so the girl is removed from the family and protected in a community for minors, registered with a false surname, so that her parents cannot find her.

The return to Pakistan and then nothing more is known about her. The family reports her missing, but then they find her through cell phone tracking. Salila is kept in a group home for seven months, every so often she comes home and spends hours with her parents. Then nostalgia takes over and so the girl decides to go home. For the Christmas holidays, the family returns to Pakistan. The teacher who had helped her the first time receives a call from Salila who tells her that she is stuck in Pakistan, without documents because her parents have confiscated them. From that moment on Salila there is no more news.

The other stories from the “Officina Gomitoli”. “In recent years we have mainly seen the Bengali and Pakistani communities grow here in Naples – explains Elena de Filippo, president of the Dedalus cooperative – but there is no shortage of families from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Georgia and now, for obvious reasons, Ukraine. But it was above all the confrontation with the young Bangladeshis and Pakistanis that prompted us to investigate the phenomenon of forced or arranged marriages, of which nothing was known in Naples before now”. But the case of Salila is one of the most emblematic, but it is not the only one. “What put us on the alert – added Elena De Filippo – was also the story of a twenty-two-year-old Bengali girl who attended theGomitoli workshop and who suddenly didn’t show up again. We learned that she had distanced herself from the family, that she did not accept her boyfriend and wanted the girl to leave him to marry a cousin, with whom they had already made an agreement. The girl rebelled, today she still lives in Naples, she no longer has contact with her parents and she continues her choice of freedom ”. The latest case concerns a thirteen-year-old girl who one day showed up at the intercultural center with a smile on her lips because her father had found her a future husband. The teenager finally felt like a part of the adult world. These stories prompted Daedalus to start the search.

The contexts. “It is important to underline that these marriages, often arranged with a cousin or in any case with older men, never take place when the girls are minors”, says the president of Daedalus. However, it is as teenagers that the family begins to prepare their destiny as wives and mothers entrusted to a man strictly chosen by them. The research also reveals the significant data that the problem of arranged or forced marriages does not only concern adolescents from Islamic countries, as is often led to believe, but also involves other types of realities, especially rural ones with a low schooling rate , therefore subjected to a patriarchal culture. In Naples, for example, episodes of forced marriages involving Nigerian or Sri Lankan girls have emerged.

The motivations. “It is the economic issues and not the religious ones, as is often thought, that determine the choice to marry one’s daughters to a particular man”, continues De Filippo. The daughter is entrusted with the task of saving the honor or survival of the family, in what are real economic transactions. Sometimes girls are betrothed to pay off a debt incurred by their fathers. Or they arrive in Italy through family reunification, but with the sole objective of getting married, for which they undergo two types of forcing: migration and arranged marriage with a stranger.

The school. The investigation of Dedalus cooperativecreated within the ST.O.RI.E project (Tools for Observing Recognizing Avoiding violence against foreign minors) and funded by Asylum Migration Integration Fund 2014-2020, wanted above all to underline the role that the school has in identifying the symptoms of discomfort. For real awareness on the subject, the Cooperative has created a game in which participants learn to overturn their point of view: put themselves in someone else’s shoes and imagine which paths to take when faced with a crossroads.